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CURRENT ISSUE NOVEMBER 24, 2003
cover story LoC-KARGIL
Reliving Kargil
A star ensemble in the rarefied heights of patriotism. J.P. Dutta's four-hour-long epic is Bollywood's ultimate tribute to the real-life heroes of the Kargil War.
By Sandeep Unnithan
The slate-grey mountains reverberate with a distant cry that builds up to a thunderous crescendo, "Durga Mata ki jai...", as soldiers of the 13 Jammu and Kashmir Rifles, hundreds of them, swarm up the hills in mottled green camouflage, rifles slung on their backs, hands clawing at the white rocks. Enemy artillery whines and crashes around them, sending up orange balls of flame even as machine-gun emplacements on the hill crest start laying out a withering rat-a-tat of murderous fire. Soldiers are scythed down, some crawl on, the rest move forward. When director Jyoti Prakash Dutta booms "Cut" through the megaphone the stars of LoC-Kargil flop down like rag dolls, wheezing out of breath, reaching for the solitary oxygen bottle handed out to them.
Sanjay Dutt as Lt Col Yogesh Kumar Joshi, 13 JAK Rifles
Suniel Shetty as Rifleman Sanjay Kumar, PVC, 13 JAK Rifles
Abhishek Bachchan as Captain Vikram Batra, PVC, 13 JAK Rifles
Nagarjuna as Major Padmapani Acharya, MVC, 2 Raj Rif
Ajay Devgan as Lt Manoj Kumar Pandey, PVC, 1/11 Gorkha Rifles
SCREEN PRESENCE: The best of Bollywood stars in LoC
Akshaye Khanna as Lt Balwan Singh, MVC, 18 Grenadiers
Manoj Bajpai as Grenadier Y.S. Yadav, PVC, 18 Grenadiers
Saif Ali Khan as Captain Anuj Nayyar, MVC, 17 Jat
The stars-Sanjay Dutt, Suniel Shetty, Abhishek Bachchan-bearded and bedraggled beyond recognition start sucking in for dear breath, seniority-wise, as any rank-conscious army unit would do, until Armaan Kohli who comes in last points out that the bottle has been empty all along. The actors crack up and laugh weakly. Even laughing is an effort at these heights.
It's no joke shooting a Bollywood blockbuster on the rarefied air of Ladakh's 10,000 ft plus altitude where oxygen is a precious commodity, when you have to yell, scream and run to recreate the human waves which overwhelmed the Kargil peaks. Dutta, the 50-year-old bearded auteur of curry westerns like Ghulami and the war epic Border, never thought it would be. But in crafting the auteur of curry westerns like Ghulami and the war epic Border, never thought it would be. But in crafting the mother of all Bollywood movies-a mammoth cast of over 50 actors, a budget conservatively estimated at Rs 35 crore and over 1,000 real soldiers with trucks, helicopters and heavy artillery thrown in-Dutta has prepared the ultimate tribute to the Kargil War heroes.
THEATRE OF WAR
Hindi films played with fire, portrayed wars on screen, honoured heroes and of ten flopped
HAQEEQAT, 1964. Chetan Anand's gritty story of an army unit resisting the Chinese wave and the everhummable patriotic tune of Kar chale hum fida. Bollywood's first and possibly best war movie.
PREM PUJARI, 1970. Dev Anand blazes on screen, thwarts Pakistan Army's designs. 1965 recreated.
HINDUSTAN KI KASAM, 1973. Chetan's salvo on IAF pilots of 1971 war.
AAKRAMAN, 1975. Sanjeev Kumar plays a tough army colonel in this J. Om Prakash film. A flop.
VIJETA, 1981. Govind Nihalani's well-made, coming-of-age film on IAF pilots. Another flop.
BORDER, 1997. J.P. Dutta revives the war-movie genre with the tale of an Indian unit winning the Battle of Longewala.
When the film is released on December 12, it will play for a back-numbing four hours, one of the lengthiest Hindi movies ever, second only to Raj Kapoor's Mera Naam Joker. It has the longest song, a 13-minute call to arms composed by Anu Malik. Sold for Rs 3 crore a territory, LoC has the industry agog. Pundits are predicting a mega opening-a 21-gun salute of a 100 per cent first week, last seen by Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham, packed-to-the rafters crowds and round-the-clock shows in Punjab. It will bring back to public memory names like Drass, Batalik and Tololing which punctuated India's first televised war.
Dutta may yet relent on his decision not to carry any of the actors on the film's posters-he wanted to use the still of an unknown soldier lying face down in the snow-but will not be sand-bagged into snipping LoC's running time so that distributors can squeeze in an extra show. After all, this was one reason why he took a leap of faith by financing the film (he won't disclose the amount) himself. A gamble at a time when Bollywood has lost traditional safety nets like table profits and mega deals for music and overseas rights. "I wanted control over my film," says Dutta, clenching fists around imaginary reins. "He has always been like that," sighs wife, former actor Bindiya.
In Bollywood's jungle, Dutta is the solitary bull elephant, left to his side of the forest, undisturbed. He occasionally goes on the rampage with runaway hits like Border which grossed Rs 40 crore, but has his share of false alarms like Refugee. He is a vegetarian and teetotaller and doesn't socialise with film folk. Dutt and Shetty are probably his only friends in filmdom. After each film, he takes a year's break, unwinding with long walks in the meadow-like parks of central London where he holidays with wife and two daughters.
Dutta, who began as an assistant director to Randhir Kapoor in Dharam Karam 28 years ago, has a David Lean-like fascination for wasteland, which earned him the industry epithet "Jaipur Dutta". Vast chunks of all his seven films, from Ghulami (1995) to Refugee (2000), are set in the deserts of Rajasthan and Gujarat, a barrenness through which he rode out the cinematic fantasies of the John Ford westerns he watched for six-anna tickets in Mumbai's now-demolished Shree Theatre. All his films are rooted in the caste- and feudalism-ridden realities of rural India-fierce-looking dacoits, sword-wielding, Samurai-like Rajputs and honour killings-all framed in spectacular khaki cinemascope.
NEW WAR MOVIES
Drawing the Battle Line
Macho men Amitabh Bachchan, Ajay Devgan, Sanjay Dutt and Suniel Shetty are doing multiple shifts playing army men. Patriotic titles are in short supply. Ladakh has replaced Switzerland as the industry's favourite shooting spot. Half-a-dozen war films worth over Rs 200 crore will be released over the next six months and stars-from Aamir Khan as the spirited sepoy triggering off 1857-The Rising to Bachchan's caged lion act in Deewar-will recreate real-life heroism. Even enduring romantic Shah Rukh Khan wears the commando beret in Main Hoon Na. Bollywood is seeing the renaissance of the war-movie genre.
The wars of 1971 and 1999 are hot favourites-four films are made on each. The army headquarters in Delhi is flooded with proposals requesting permission, men and equipment. "It is the Kargil effect," says an official. Brigadier (retd) Sudhir Arora who advises filmmakers on military backdrops has ensured that a dozen films get their outfits and lingo right. Getting into uniform for the occasional cameo is one of the perks, but Arora isn't sure the trend will last: "They may return to romance in Switzerland." But for now chiffons don't flutter on mountaintops, it is definitely heavy footfalls on the snow.
DEEWAR: "There hasn't been a Hindi film like this yet," says producer Gaurang Doshi of the Rs 35 crore film in which Dutt rescues war hero Bachchan from a Karachi prison. For Rs 1.5 crore Filmcity becomes a Pakistani fort.
RAFTAAR: "Four Chinooks, 10 Hueys, two Black Hawks," producer Firoz A. Nadiadwala rattles off the wishlist for his war film. The mission to rescue stranded soldiers in the Northeast begins next year. In Thailand, of all places.
TANGO CHARLIE: Director Mani Shankar's story of a BSF jawan, played by Bobby Deol, battling terrorists and the Naxalites. Cameos by Devgan, Dutt and Shetty.
AGNI PANKH: The film on IAF has rare footage of aerial fights. Jimmy Shergill (left), Samir Dharmadhikari and Rahul Dev plot their escape from Pakistan.
AB TUMHARE HAWALE WATAN SAATHIYON: Anil Sharma, director of jingo-pop Gadar, raises the decibel on a generation turning away from battle fatigues.
VANDE MATARAM: Much of the cast of LoC-Kargil moves to Bangladesh's deltas for an encore in Nitin Manmohan's film on the 1971 War.
LAKSHYA: Farhan Akhtar goes to the war zone on the back of his father Javed's tale of a soldier in the Kargil War. A close-cropped Hrithik Roshan (right) pairs with Preity Zinta and Big B.
SARHAD PAAR: Sanjay Dutt is a POW in a Pakistani camp. Fields of Punjab, Kargil heights, Tabu as grieving wife, they are all there.
Making a film on the superhuman acts of courage in the moonscape of Kargil should have come naturally to Dutta. But it didn't. Post-Border, the first of his war trilogy, Dutta ruminated on a film on the Bangladesh war but shelved it as it would mean showing the genocide inflicted by Pakistani troops. "And I had no intention of opening old wounds," he says.
Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's bus ride to Lahore was almost a realisation of Dutta's fervent wish in Border's last scene-the flags of India and Pakistan fluttering together. Except that Pakistan's Northern Light Infantry was already fortifying its bunkers and stocking them with rations and ammunition on the Indian side of the loc. To Dutta, it was a betrayal of faith. "It was like I went to my neighbour's house and he used the opportunity to sneak into mine," he says.
Then months after Refugee, Dutta met army brass in Delhi who wanted him to make a film on Kargil. At their insistence, he toured the freezing fronts of Kargil and Drass, sat with troops in bunkers, listened to stories of dead soldiers who had signed up only because they had seen his Border.
In Kargil, a euphemism for a 150-km-long front which erupted in a wall of flame in May 1999, mountains turned into meat grinders. Thousands of ill-equipped Indian soldiers had flung themselves in charges up the hillsides at altitudes of over 15,000 ft in biting cold, against well-entrenched, fortified Pakistani bunkers. More than 500 had died doing so, 99 had been shot through the eye as they climbed. There was fierce hand-to-hand fighting and the officers had led from the front-the army sustained the highest officer-to-soldier casualty in 20th century conflict. Hearing the tale, the stoic Dutta broke down on many occasions. "It was the triumph of human spirit over impossible odds," he says. "The story had to be told.''
India has fought five wars since Independence and fights several undeclared ones in insurgencies but you wouldn't know it from Bollywood. Unlike Hollywood which faithfully churns out war films almost at the rate of one-a-year, the Hindi industry has stood away from the genre. There aren't enough films to compile even a Top Five. "We have never had a war film,'' scoffs playwright Aamir Raza Husain, who crafted the lavish Kargil play The Fifty Day War. "All we have had are love stories told in the backdrop of war." War has always been a pretext to bump off one end of a love triangle, it has never been depicted in all its savagery. For an industry that thrives on boy-meets-girl comfort, the logistical nightmare of recreating a war theatre is something it has learned to live without.
So dialogue writer O.P. Dutta echoed conventional industry wisdom when his son revealed plans to make the Kargil saga. "Son," said the octogenarian, "this is a tough one. Keep out of it." But the headstrong director who had toured the country with a Handycam, visiting families of real heroes, exchanging tales of personal grief-J.P. Dutta lost his brother, an air force pilot, in a mig-21 crash six years ago-was already calling stars to his office. The offers were made with a terse telephone message in the manner of a World War I enlistment poster: "J.P. Dutta Wants You". Dutta had carefully selected seasoned stars because with nine cameras-most films are shot with three-consuming precious footage, he couldn't afford to have them make costly mistakes.
THE HEROINES
Women on the Verge of War
In the gallery of war-film cliches, it is said if a soldier shows a photo of his small-town sweetheart to someone, he is fated to die fairly soon.Now with 11 LoC heroes carrying photographs of an equal number of heroines, expect plenty of heartbreak. Especially because the real soldiers had left behind their beloveds on their trek to the front with touching gestures-cliched, perhaps, but real nevertheless-Captain Vikram Batra had whipped out a blade and cut his finger to apply blood on his college sweetheart Dimple's forehead.
"War is ugly, life is beautiful," says Dutta. "The men are destroyers, the women are creators. They are the real strength behind the men." True. But with the all-male ensemble cast doing the fighting, the women in the sidelines-winsome satellite phone conversations and brief romantic interludes-are almost like an afterthought. Dutta actually cast the heroines only after his last shooting spell in Ladakh.
The bigger heroines-Kareena Kapoor, Rani Mukherjee, Esha Deol, Mahima Chaudhary and Raveena Tandon-have walk-on parts while the rest, Preeti Jhangiani, Namrata Shirodkar, Priya Gill, Isha Koppikar, Divya Dutta and Akansha Malhotra have blink-and-you-miss-them appearances. That did not prevent any of them from flying to LoC like moths to a fleeting flame to be part of the landmark film. Even Kapoor, who famously fought a cold war with Karan Johar last year over her fee, worked for free.
Dutta spent as much time meeting the women who suffered in the sidelines as he did the soldiers, getting photographs and recording footage for the cast to view and get into methodacting mode. Deol listened to the taped speech of Dimple before she began shooting opposite Abhishek Bachchan while Kapoor pretty much sleep-walked on the sets to play temperamental Delhi girl Simran engaged to Captain Anuj Nayyar (Saif Ali Khan). And with Chaudhary playing Grenadier Yogender Yadav's (Manoj Bajpai) week-old bride who waits for his body to arrive, LoC-Kargil is all set to be an 11-hankie weepie war movie.
The actors came in droves-from Dutta-favourites Dutt and Shetty to fresh-faced Bikram Saluja and cast-iron character artists like Ashutosh Rana. Most of them were given a one-line narration of their role, for there was no script to narrate (Dutta is one of the few directors in the world who shoots without a script). "He carries it up here," says Bindiya, pointing to the forehead. "I improvise when I hit the sets,'' is Dutta's reason. That's not the reason he is variously called a terror, a megalomaniac and a dictator. His actors are either in awe of him or they quake in their boots. "I can't say anything, man," said Saif Ali Khan sheepishly when asked about his role a year ago. "JP will kill me."
Yet what is it about this introverted director that has half of Bollywood marching into a star-crammed project where they will not see a script and have the screen time of a junior artist? "It is that moment,'' says Shetty. "JP gives you the one cinematic moment for which you will be remembered." In Border, Shetty charged at a Pakistani tank, in LoC it is a machine-gun nest which he attacks-hands bandaged to protect them from the flaming barrels which he uproots, almost like a Sunny Deol act in Gadar. Devgan, who turned down Border as he did not want to be in a multi-starrer, agreed to play Lt Manoj Kumar Pandey this time in an even bigger starcast. "JP just asked me to trust him," says Devgan.
When Dutta landed with his 150-man unit in Ladakh in March last year, he knew he would not be able to match the technical wizardry of a Hollywood blockbuster so he decided to make it as gut-wrenchingly realistic as possible. Even if it meant giving shooting a whole new meaning-they used thousands of rounds of live ammunition on sets. Actors were given a crash course by the army in firing assault rifles, light machine guns and rocket launchers. Why use live ordnance? "Because you can't fire on automatic using blanks," Dutta's reply is matter of fact.
REALITY BITES: Devgan leads charge in LoC; (below) Indian soldiers at Tololing
Actors, accustomed to high-comfort levels, Armanis and suvs, worked at minus-15 degree Celsius during the day and minus-25 by night, walked around swathed in five layers of high-altitude clothing and took bumpy jeep rides. They were divided into the five units which had reclaimed the peaks along the Kargil salient-the bulk of the stars was clumped in the 13 JAK Rif, the only army unit to bag two Param Vir Chakras in a single operation.
Abhishek Bachchan was selected to play the heartbreakingly tragic Captain Vikram Batra who adlibbed his way into immortality with the definitive line of the war "Yeh dil maange more", partly for a fleeting resemblance to the soldier and a sense of humour. Bachchan is the only one who could get away by scribbling a cheeky "except Abhishek" under a "No Entry-by order of the director" sign on Dutta's hallowed editing room. "It was like a summer camp for boys," laughs Bachchan junior. Dutt, who plays his commanding officer, does not seem to think so. "It was the most arduous shoot of my life," he grimaces. "I woke up in the morning, poured out a bucket of boiling water. It would become ice by the time I had two cups of tea." Shooting began in the late afternoons and continued through the night, so it wasn't exactly difficult to translate their suffering onto screen. "It was worse when the petrol bombs went off near by," says Shetty. "It sucked the oxygen. Every step was an effort." It wasn't so for him, says Dutta. He is asthmatic and jokes he is used to breathlessness.
WAR LORD: Dutta on the location of LoC, the last of his war trilogy
Two unit hands died when their hearts gave way during the punishing schedule over 80 days. The shoot gave the actors a perspective on how the Indian Army fought and won against desperate odds. "Climbing at night and fighting by day, making a choice between carrying food and ammunition, no other army in the world would have pulled it off," says Devgan.
For a while it seemed even Dutta would not be able to pull it off. First there was a three-month delay when the army's 10-month mobilisation in 2002 saw his Sovexport style military largesse-men and equipment-rushed away from his sets and deployed on to the real frontier. Then there were the industry jibes as other ambitious Kargil films like Husain's Lakeer fell by the wayside and a spate of Pakistan-bashing films like The Hero died at the box office. But Dutta doggedly continued shooting and amassed over 3,75,000 ft of footage-enough to make three films- before he said cut for the last time. "I don't care about the industry," says Dutta. "They would rather have me shoot inane films in Switzerland. I only care for the mother of a dead war hero who rings me up and blesses me." Clearly, for him the two-year project was from the heart.
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